Pleasing Terrors

Alyson Horrocks from the Strange and Unusual Podcast took me on a tour of a historical site with a dark past. The site sits in a town called Danvers, but it was once Salem Village. This site was the culmination of a strange mix of religion, superstition, folklore, slavery, patriarchy, truth, and lies. A place where people’s imagination or secret motives ran wild and story or lie or desperate attempt at redemption led to the basis for one of the darkest times in colonial American History. What started as a search for freedom to pursue religion and all things good, and ended in a nondescript historical site and archaeological dig, has a sinister history with a story that is hard to tell and even harder to understand. Salem Village was settled in the late 1600s In 1970, Richard B. Trask started excavating the “Danvers Dig” 1688 Samuel Parris moved into the house that once stood at the dig. Parris brought an enslaved South American couple named John and Tituba. In 1692, the invisible world began to close around